The Real Virginia Woolf

CH The success of the Hours has obviously brought Virginia Woolf to the fore again, what did you think of the film?
SB I thought it was an excellent film. I was quite moved by the opening segments with Virginia going off to drown herself but I felt from then on it seemed to portray her as being away with the fairies twenty four hours a day. I thought that wasunfortunate and it made her appear as though she was permanently in mental turmoil and anybody who knows anything about what she achieved in her life will know that it would be impossible to drift around like that and achieve the amount that she did. In a way I felt it reinforced the stereotype, which is a shame in from my point of view, or the Society’s point of view or for anybody who cares about her reputation. But then you have to really think about the perspective the film was made from, its not made for the specialist, these films never are. I’m not critical of the film for inaccuracies because a films a film but its just the general portrayal I don’t like. Anything that sends people to Virginia Woolf’s books is a good thing. I think that the segments with Virginia did less justice to the book than the other two segments did on Mrs Dalloway the novel. It brought the themes of Mrs Dalloway through very strongly and I thought those worked magnificently.

CH Much is made of Woolf’s mental health, how did it really affect her?
SB She knew when she was mentally ill, she could sense when she was slipping into those phases of her life. But the way it was portrayed in the film gives the impression that she was always on the verge and I don’t think that was really true.

It affected her writing in the sense that it comes out obviously in characters like Septimus in Mrs Dalloway, so she portrays what she would call madness and how poorly the Doctors diagnosed it and how poorly they treated him and that was a direct reflection of how she was treated herself, almost like a "pull your socks up Mrs Woolf" type of prescription. She was very critical of the way she was treated. It wasn’t diagnosed at the time, but the general consensus looking back on it now is that she had a Bi-polar disorder.

I think in her mature years that the depression tended to come after she’d written a novel and she was waiting for the reaction or she had done the bulk of the work and she was maybe working over it, she worked very hard at revising drafts, that’s when it seemed to happen I think.

She was a brave person and looked at suicide and her "illness" square in the face. She heard voices, it must be terribly distressing, I can’t imagine what it must be like, you must be so desperate at that stage to have no choice but to take your own life.

CH Did she love her husband or see him as a restriction?
SB I think there’s been a great deal of anti Leonard propaganda over recent years, that he manipulated the situation, or suppressed her. Of course it’s all conjecture really, I believe that he did his best with the knowledge he had and I don’t think that there was any maliciousness in his intent at all, it was a very difficult situation and they seemed to work very well together, they ran Hogarth press together amongst doing countless other things. Maybe that was the success of their marriage - they were extremely busy. It was a "marriage of true minds" - I think he respected her intellect and vice versa and it worked on that level.

CH The film has a theme of Sapphic love, how does this reflect Woolf’s real life?
SB She would often go to her sister for affection, but the passion of the kiss with Vanessa in the film didn’t seem to me to feel right. Her sister came across as a snooty upper class woman who was deigning to patronise her sister, I think it was a simplification of a very complicated relationship that the sisters had, it was very competitive as well as loving. There’s no doubt that she had an affection for women and enjoyed their company, probably more than men. She did have a brief physical affair with Vita Sackville West.

Mrs Dalloway herself spends the day thinking about her past and she had an infatuation with a female in her youth and she wonders glancingly what would have happened if she had made that choice rather than marrying her husband, Woolf was very interested in issues of gender and androgyny, in Orlando you have a character who changes sex half way through a book. I think it’s in A Room of One s Own where she gives and analogy of a man and a women getting into the taxi and this whole thing of a man being womanly and a woman manly. She felt very much that there was both in all of us but one in slightly higher proportions. She stood up for the Well of Loneliness – the publication of Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian novel and signed a letter to say that it shouldn’t be banned, protesting against censorship, despite the fact she knew it was poor literature but the principle that people should be allowed to be express those sort of things in a novel – she stood for all of that.

CH How has she been misrepresented?
SB The film reinforces that misrepresentation of her being in an ivory tower, being an elitist. Fragility and her being like a delicate Victorian flower that has found herself in the 20th century is just totally wrong. As a person she was quite robust, you only have to follow her walking footsteps to see that she would walk for miles and miles and she would not be able to achieve what she did if she had no discipline.

She is accused of being anti Semitic because of some comments in her diaries and letters principally and yet her husband was Jewish and I think it’s very easy to judge people by today’s standards from private documents which I think is unfair. I’m sure none of us would be proud of our inner thoughts all the time and the fact that hers have been published must weaken her position. Its quite extraordinary how she seems to excite such derision in people which other writers seem to avoid, I don’t know why that should be apart from a) she was a woman and b) she was intellectual!

CH What is the attraction of Woolf so many years on?
SB I suppose the initial thing that you have to go back to is the quality of the prose. The novels are beautiful creations and poetic – they are a joy to read. They can be read at different levels and sustain many re-readings. One of her strengths is she’s always very personal so you feel she shows what its like to be alive.

Apart from being an extremely interesting person she was writing at a time when the world was changing between two world wars and modernism was coming to fruition. She was right at the front of that, changing the way we write and think about ourselves.

Her books certainly come across to me as classic, in the sense that they are as relevant to us now as they were when they were written. They stand the test of time. It’s her diversity of work as well. We’ve got six volumes of letters, 5 volumes of diaries plus another volume of early journals. There are six volumes-worth of essays that she wrote through her whole life from when she was about 22 to her death and they talk about so many different subjects, reviews of novels, the purpose of writing and cinema and there is plenty of short fiction as well which has tended to be sidelined. With all this information we really feel we know more about her than about ourselves, certainly more than anybody else!

CH What is her legacy?
SB One of the fundamental things is Woolf’s writing and her honesty in her writing She encouraged many other people, particularly women to pick up the pen and write as well and I’m sure that she’s been responsible for some of the best novelists that have followed in the 20th century. I think she has also influenced education, feminist studies may have been far less rich area if it hadn’t been for her work.

Often Woolf is seen as somebody who is quite difficult to read, where should a novice start?
Definitely Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Her books aren’t difficult to read at all, there’s no difficult vocabulary. The only thing people sometimes feel is that her novels are not primarily plot-driven and her sentences sometimes go on too long and it’s difficult to keep track. You may get different characters' perspectives in the same sentence but I really don’t think they are difficult, even a book as experimental as The Waves. I do feel that her work isn’t suitable for picking up and putting down on a tube journey, you totally lose track. You really do need to devote chunks of time to let her permeate properly I believe.

The Virginia Woolf Society has a membership of around 300 and exists to encourage people to discuss the themes in Woolf’s life and work and enhance her reputation. The society is hoping to erect a bust of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury and trying to raise about £16000 to achieve this. Anybody who is interested in the work of the society should contact Stephen Barkway on stephen.barkway@virgin.net